Good stuff and always appreciated. I think the primary question is actually very easy to answer. Size does not matter (unless your event goal is to proclaim having the world’s largest virtual event — woo-hoo!). Much like its siter industry, the physical event, size is all relevant to your event goals and objectives. I have seen very successful events with about 50 attendees as well as very successful events of 100,000+ attendees. The real challenge, which you cover here and cleverly was the point of your article to start, is to focus on your customers’ ROI (sponsors and attending customers), quality content, and meaningful engagement. Get good at those three things and your event can get as big, or small, as you desire.

Thanks for sharing,
Brad

]]>By: Cece Salomon-Leehttp://www.prmeetsmarketing.com/2010/09/21/does-size-matter-with-virtual-events/comment-page-1/#comment-691
Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:43:31 +0000http://www.prmeetsmarketing.com/?p=1537#comment-691@Dennis, I agree that for scalability reasons, the number of attendees is key. My goal was to move the discussion away from just “largest event” to discuss other areas of consideration as well. =)

@Scott, thanks for highlighting the behavioral metrics which will help with understanding intent and hopefully lead to future sales.

Where it does matter, though, is when your planned event needs to support 10,000 simultaneous users or perhaps even 50,000. It’s here where the underlying platform “matters”, because a platform that can’t handle the load will result in a negative experience for attendees.

As you know, 6Connex has focused on behavioral metrics that result in actionable reports for sales, marketing and other departments. As such, I’d add that element to your consideration about what kinds of metrics are important. For example, length of stay could mean people had to wait long periods of time for videos to download, or that it took a long time for folks to get acclimated to a virtual environment.

What’s better is to provide insight into what people engaged in, and how they did it. For example, did they add items to a virtual briefcase AND download it. Did they watch ENTIRE videos, or just click on them (this is an important insight for content strategy) and more. We think it’s so important, we designed our reporting engine to allow users to DEFINE what the most important behaviors are, measure those custom items in a separate report AND have that report emailed to appropriate personnel as often as the virtual experience organizer wants.

For virtual experiences to be successful they have to deliver the entire promise of the Web: connecting people with each other and with relevant content, on the user’s terms and in a format they desire.

Thank you for your continued first-class insights into this neck of the technology woods.